Saturday, August 29, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts -- Financial Times Declares For State Fascism

According to this article, the Financial Times and an
anonymous coward who will not reveal his name have come out in favor of State
Fascism. The plan is to eliminate cash and, thereby,private savings and private transactions.

The Financial Times has published an anonymous article
which calls for the abolition of cash in order to give central banks and
governments more power.

Entitled The case for
retiring another ‘barbarous relic’, the article laments the fact that people are
stockpiling cash in anticipation of another economic collapse, a factor which
is causing, “a lot of distortion to the economic system.”

“The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a
zero interest rate — limits central banks’ ability to stimulate a depressed
economy. The worry is that people will change their deposits for cash if a
central bank moves rates into negative territory,” states the article.

Complaining that cash cannot be tracked and traced,
the writer argues that its abolition would, “make life easier for a government
set on squeezing the informal economy out of existence.”

Abolishing cash would also give governments more power
to lift taxes directly from people’s bank accounts, the author argues, noting
how “Value added tax, for example, could be automatically levied — and
reimbursed — in real time on transactions between liable bank accounts.”

The writer also calls for punishing people who use
cash by making users “pay for the privilege of anonymity” so they will, “remain
affected by monetary policy.” Dated bank notes would lose their value over
time, while people would also be charged by banks for swapping electronic
reserves for physical cash and vice versa.

The article echoes an argument made by Kenneth Rogoff,
former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who has called for
high denomination banks notes such as the €100 and €500 notes to be phased out
of existence.

As we previously reported, Rogoff attended a meeting in London earlier this
year where he met representatives from the Federal Reserve, the ECB as well as
participants from the Swiss and Danish central banks. The issue of banning cash
was at the forefront of the agenda.

Last year, Rogoff also called for “abolishing physical currency” in order to
stop “tax evasion and illegal activity” as well as preventing people from
withdrawing money when interest rates are close to zero.

The agenda to ban cash was also discussed at this year’s secretive Bilderberg Group
meeting, which wasattended by the Financial Times’ chief economics
commentator Martin Wolf.

Former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss penned an
article for the London
Telegraph earlier this
year in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by “forcing
everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a
government-run bank,” which would be, “monitored, or even directly controlled
by the government.”

In the UK, banks are treating the withdrawal of cash
in amounts as low as £5,000 as a suspicious activity, while in France, citizens will be banned from
making cash payments over
€1,000 euros from Tuesday onwards. The withdrawal and deposit of cash over the
amount of €1,000 euros will also be subject to ID verification.

“Of course, if cash were involuntarily “ended,” there
would be a surge in demand for physical gold and silver, which would then
necessitate a ban on those items. Then the cycle of economic and financial
tyranny would be complete, and crawling our way out of it, nearly impossible.”